XIX. ThestoryofTomtittot
An
old Suffolk Tale, given in the
dialect
of East Anglia. From
“Tom
Tit Tot. An Essay on
Savage
Philosophy in Folk
Tale,”
by Edward Clodd.

XX. ThepeasantstoryofNapoleon
From
“The Country Doctor,”
by
Honore de Balzac. Translated
by
Katharine Prescott
Wormeley.

INTRODUCTION

When the traveller looks at Rome for the first time
he does not realize that there have been several cities
on the same piece of ground, and that the churches
and palaces and other great buildings he sees to-day
rest on an earlier and invisible city buried in dust
beneath the foundations of the Rome of the Twentieth
Century. In like manner, and because all visible
things on the surface of the earth have grown out of
older things which have ceased to be, the world of
habits, the ideas, customs, fancies, and arts, in
which we live is a survival of a younger world which
long ago disappeared. When we speak of Friday
as an unlucky day, or touch wood after saying that
we have had good luck for a long time, or take the
trouble to look at the new moon over the right shoulder,
or avoid crossing the street while a funeral is passing,
we are recalling old superstitions or beliefs, a vanished
world in which our remote forefathers lived.

We do not realize how much of this vanished world
still survives in our language, our talk, our books,
our sculpture and pictures. The plays of Shakespeare
are full of reference to the fancies and beliefs of
the English people in his time or in the times not
long before him. If we could understand all these
references as we read, we should find ourselves in
a world as different from the England of to-day as
England is from Austria, and among a people whose
ideas and language we should find it hard to understand.

In those early days there were no magazines or newspapers,
and for the people as contrasted with the scholars
there were no books. The most learned men were
ignorant of things which intelligent children know
to-day; only a very few men and women could read or
write; and all kinds of beliefs about animals, birds,
witches, fairies, giants, and the magical qualities
of herbs and stones flourished like weeds in a neglected
garden. There came into existence an immense mass
of misinformation about all manner of things; some
of it very stupid, much of it very poetic and interesting.